There was something in the art world air in the twentieth century that caused writers of now-standard art histories to grudgingly pose the question "What is art?" It may be the most important question for a philosopher to concern himself with. What is art? How is it known? And how, given the answers to these questions, may it be evaluated? We will look at two books on this subject: Beauty by philosopher and critics Roger Scruton and Cynthia Freeland: but is it art? Both writers are consummate prose stylists who display as well as discuss a fine aesthetic sensibility. We will use the Holy Virgin Mary painting by Chris Ofili and the Matana Roberts performance as the template for which we will assess the fine line between aesthetics and ethics according to these philosophers.
The Holy Virgin Mary is a painting created by Chris Ofili in 1996. The subject of the work, and its execution, caused considerable controversy– describing Ofili's work as "sick". The piece features a yellow-orange background, the large painting (8x6) depicts a black …show more content…
He begins with the importance of taste by suggesting that one’s taste reflects one’s character (Scruton 123), and then he deals with two areas where a lack of beauty has desecrated that which is sacred. The first is pornography, suggesting that it reduces the human to an object – a body – and thus loses the embodiment that makes humans beautiful. The second is kitsch in relation to religious images. Scruton would disagree with Freeland and consider the “religious” art piece of the Virgin disgraceful and unethical. As Scruton notes ‘images are of enormous importance in religion, helping us to understand the Creator through idealized visions of his world: concrete images of transcendental truths.’ (Scruton 159) In contrast, kitsch is ‘when people prefer the sensuous trappings of belief to the thing truly believed in.’ (Scruton